Map indexes of the Second Military Survey in 1:28,800 scale for Galicia and Austrian Silesia, mid-19th century.
Description
The data set presents the map indexes of the Second Military Survey in 1:28,800 scale for Galicia and Austrian Silesia, two provinces of the Austrian Monarchy. Currently, Galicia belongs to Ukraine and Poland, and Austrian Silesia to the Czech Republic and Poland. The indexes, apart from the approximate geographical range, contain information about the authors and the years in which individual sheets were produced. The authors of the maps are distinguished as directors, surveyors and drafters, description writers, and reambulators. For each author, the name of the military unit to which he belonged is given. This is a unique set of data obtained from the map frames of 455 sheets held by the War Archives in Vienna. The Second Austrian Military Survey in 1:28,800 scale was made for the province of Galicia in 1861-1864 and for Austrian Silesia in 1838-1841. In Galicia, the work on 413 sheets was led by thirteen cartographers, and the content and descriptions were prepared by 106 cartographic technicians. On the 42 sheets of Silesia, two directors and eleven technicians were recorded. The military cartographers who prepared the survey of each province belonged to 71 different multinational units of the army of the Austrian Monarchy. These data can be useful for geographers and historians, especially for those researching the history of cartography. Knowing the diverse authorship of the map sheets is helpful in understanding the consistency of the data on maps and assessing their quality. This may help reduce the uncertainty of using historical data from these maps for a variety of long-term studies of nature and socio-economic studies. Acknowledgments This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Republic of Poland under the frame of “National Programme for the Development of Humanities” 2015–2020, as a part of the GASID project (Galicia and Austrian Silesia Interactive Database 1857–1910, 1aH 15 0324 83).
Files
Steps to reproduce
We shared the data in open, widely used shapefile format. According to shapefile format specification, boundary geometries are available in a direct access, main file with shp extension. In the shx index file, each record contains the offset of the corresponding main file record from the beginning of the main file. The attributes, as dBASE table with one record per feature, are available in dbf extension. The one-to-one relationship between geometry and attributes is based on a record number. Attribute records in the dBASE file are the same order as records in the main file. Examples of mandatory files for shapefile format: ● Galicia_map_index.shp; ● Galicia_map_index.shx; ● Galicia_map_index.dbf. Examples of other files for shapefile format: ● Galicia_map_index.cpg — used to specify the code page (only for .dbf) for identifying the character encoding to be used; ● Galicia_map_index.prj — projection description with text representation of coordinate reference systems; ● Galicia_map_index.sbn and Galicia_map_index.sbx — a spatial index of the features; ● Galicia_map_index.shp.xml — geospatial metadata in XML format. The ZIP archives can be opened directly using QGIS open software https://qgis.org or after unpacking using e.g. 7-Zip https://www.7-zip.org/ or WinZip https://www.winzip.com also load with a single command Add Data to ArcGIS Desktop or ArcGIS Pro https://www.arcgis.com. The data set consists of six independent layers, files in .shp format: AustrianSilesia_border – the borders of the province of Austrian Silesia, derived from maps in 1:28,800 scale Galicia_border – the borders of the province of Galicia derived from maps in 1:28,800 scale AustrianSilesia_map_index – the index of maps for the province of Austrian Silesia Galicia_map_index – the index of maps for the province of Galicia ASilesia_placenames_pop5000 – names for towns with polulation > 5000 in 1857 Galicia_placenames_pop5000 – names for towns with polulation > 5000 in 1857 The geographical range of the sheet geometry is approximate. The provincial borders are derived from maps on a scale of 1:28,800. Layers with indexes contain the following attributes (fields): Section – section number on the map sheet Column – column number on the map sheet YearBeg – year in which work on the map sheet began YearEnd – year in which work on the map sheet was completed Director – director of the work on the map sheet DirectorUn – military unit of the director on the map sheet SurveyedBy –surveyor for the map, drawing the content on the map sheet SurveyedUn – military unit of the map surveyor, drawing the content one map sheet DescribdBy – description writer for the map sheet DescribdUn – military units of the description writer for the map sheet ReambltdBy – reambulator (verifying accuracy) for the map sheet ReambltdUn – military unit of the reambulator (verifying accuracy) for the map sheet SurvYear – year survey was made. Applies to reambulated map sheets.